Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

An anonymous reader writes "Nanoparticles have been able to disable cancerous cells in living human bodies for the first time. The results are perfect so far, killing tumors with no side effects whatsoever. Mark Davis, project leader at CalTech, says that 'it sneaks in, evades the immune system, delivers the siRNA, and the disassembled components exit out.' Truly amazing."

They have RNA that attaches to cancerous and only cancerous cells. Of course, there are types of cancer that wont "bind" with this thingies, but supposedly, if I remeber correctly, they are the rarest.

It's a phase-I trial, it only confirms safety already established in animal models and kinetics. Phase-II and phase-III trials, much larger in scale, assess efficacy and optimum dosing. That will tell us if this can be more effective than traditional chemotherapy (possible) and monoclonal chemotherapy (much more difficult to predict).

Who cares how the particles get inside the cancer cells? Does it matter if we use microscopic needles and inject every single cancer cell or just throw a bunch of square pegs at square holes and hope for the best?

The end result is that the medicine winds up where it should be, and doesn't seem to be accumulating where it shouldn't.

When the components are mixed together in water, they assemble into particles about 70 nanometres in diameter. The researchers can then administer the nanoparticles into the bloodstream of patients, where the particles circulate until they encounter 'leaky' blood vessels that supply the tumours with blood. The particles then pass through the vessels to the tumour, where they bind to the cell and are then absorbed.

So maybe that counts as targeted. Maybe not. I don't care either way - it works, regardless of semantics.

The problem with that quote is sufficiently advanced is a relative term with respect to a technologically evolved society. For example the a working light bulb would magic for a pre-electric society, but isn't all that magical now.